


Better Just Leave and Run

by keyboardclicks



Category: This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us - Edgar Cantero
Genre: Adrian just wants to be a teenager haha good luck bud, Angst, Bullying, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-14 20:49:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17515667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keyboardclicks/pseuds/keyboardclicks
Summary: Adrian hadn't meant to punch the boy who had been bothering him, who had been standing over him and leering and jabbing at his chest with a prodding finger.  He hadn't told his left arm to swing, hadn't wanted it to break a boy's nose and come back bloody.  But that's what his body did, because it wasn't entirely his.





	Better Just Leave and Run

“Why did you do that? Why did you _make me_ do that?!”

Kimrean sat, hunched over behind the dumpster of a Burger King four blocks from Mar Vista High School. The group of boys who ran in pursuit had been lost some time during the journey, but it still felt safest to hide. Adrian, thin and lanky and in a body disoriented by the hormones of simultaneous puberties, panted both from the exertion of running and from the tempered fury that was building in his stomach. He hadn’t even thought about being afraid; not when running across the street and nearly being hit by a car that didn’t understand what “25mph: school zone” meant, not when hopping a five foot fence in 3.27 seconds, not when hearing the voices of the five boys bent on his destruction braying at his heels like mad dogs. He’d only thought about the rage he felt when his left hand broke a boy’s nose and came back bloody, because he hadn’t told it to do that.

A voice, his voice, using his mouth but not his thoughts, a voice that would one day have the name Zooey said, “He was going to hit us. He called us a freak!”

“We _are_ freaks!”

(A woman walking her dog paused upon hearing the yelling of a person currently concealed to her, but continued on and decided to ignore it because she had experienced weirder things in her life and wasn’t eager to get involved. The dog took a little more convincing, but eventually followed.)

“Yeah, but we’re two freaks, not one.”

Adrian’s hands curled into his jeans. The nail of his middle right finger threatened to break, a small ridge of keratin catching on the thread.

“We should have just _run._ Now they’ll expell me and send me back to the hospital or juvie or something, _fuck!”_ Adrian his his face in his arms, ran fingers painfully through his hair. “But you just _had_ to make me punch him in the face, didn’t you? While the principal was _standing right fucking there!_ ”

“I didn’t _make you_ do it, _I_ did it.”

“It’s the same thing to them! What am I gonna do? Pull out the old ‘oh it wasn’t me, it was the other person who controls my body!’ excuse? Because that’s worked _so damn well before.”_

The voice that would one day be Zooey was quiet. Then it said, “Well… It’s true. And it’s my body, too! Besides, people punch each other all the time at that place!”

“Maybe! But those people haven’t been labeled as dangerous, high-risk individuals because they’ve got a juvie record a mile long! Not to mention all the loony bin stays I’ve got under my belt; pretty sure I’ve earned a free round of ELS at this point.”

Adrian groaned and scrubbed his face in his hands, shifted his messenger bag on his shoulder and hated how it dipped between the little bit of cleavage he had and made it more obvious. The female puberty had begun ahead of the male one, which doctors assured him was normal for his type of hermaphrodism, so a-cup sized breasts hid under every shirt he wore. If he were chubbier perhaps they wouldn’t stand out so bad, but as things were they just made him an easier target for every brand of teenage bullying that included “You’re different so we’re going to make your life more difficult”, which happened to be all of them.

“I liked this place, too,” he admitted, hugging his knees and resting his chin atop them.

“What? Why? It’s a shithole. There’s mold in the bathrooms, the teachers don’t give a shit, the lunches taste like death, and everyone in every single class is a raging asshole!”

“That’s high school. You just described high school.”

“No wonder everyone’s depressed and doing drugs! Instead of blaming Mexican cartels for all the shit wrong with this country, politicians should step inside a high school and _then_ they’ll see where the blame lies.”

“Yeah, it’s shitty. But it’s _normal._ It’s the normal shitty stuff that all fourteen year olds put up with.” And he liked the routine. Liked the consistency, the schedule. He liked waking up at 7:05 every morning, having history at 8:50, lunch at 12:15, English at 1:30. He liked going to math and losing himself in equations and numbers, liked going to science and learning about how and why things worked the way they did.

The voice that would one day be Zooey Kimrean disagreed. “Normal’s boring! You gotta shake shake shake it up!” Accompanied by unwelcome shaking, as if Kimrean were attempting to dance.

“I’d take a normal, shitty, boring high school over the excitement of psych ward stays and juvie sentences,” Adrian sighed. “And stop that! I hate dancing!” 

And for a bit both voices that used his mouth were silent.

A sigh deeper than had any right coming from a fourteen year old came from the lungs of Adrian Kimrean, as he stood up and stretched, now confident that it was safe to leave his hiding spot. He leaned against the dumpster and it made a hollow thud, disturbing the flies that baked beneath the California sun. Opening the flap of his messenger bag, he quickly flipped through the various folders and books contained within, checking that nothing had fallen out during the chase. Maybe he was going to be expelled, but maybe he wasn’t. Nothing about that would be changed by rushing back to his foster home before he had to. He could get a few more hours of normalcy before he was back up to his eyeballs in social workers and white lab coats.

“If I buy a chocolate milkshake will you let me do my homework in peace?”

A fist pumped in the air, and Kimrean bounced on their toes before rounding the dumpster corner and sprinting towards the Burger King entrance. Adrian barely had time to close his bag before his legs moved out of his own control. “Hell yeah! Chocolate!”

“ _Promise?_ ”

“Cross my heart!” Left index finger made a quick cross over the heart while the right pulled open the heavy, glass door.

“That’s _my_ heart.”

The girl that would one day be called Zooey Kimrean shrugged. “You don’t know that.”

(It wasn’t.)


End file.
